Android specific bindings for Rx.

This module adds a number of classes to RxJava that make writing reactive components in Android applications easy and hassle free. More specifically, it

• provides a Scheduler that schedules an Observable on a given Android Handler thread, particularly the main UI thread
• provides base Observer implementations that make guarantees w.r.t. to reliable and thread-safe use throughout Fragment and Activity life-cycle callbacks (coming soon)
• provides reusable, self-contained reactive components for common Android use cases and UI concerns (coming soon)

Binaries and dependency information for Maven, Ivy, Gradle and others can be found at http://search.maven.org.

Example for Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.netflix.rxjava</groupId>
    <artifactId>rxjava-android</artifactId>
    <version>0.10.1</version>
</dependency>

and for Ivy:

<dependency org="com.netflix.rxjava" name="rxjava-android" rev="0.10.1" />

We are working on a samples project which provides runnable code samples that demonstrate common Rx patterns and their use in Android applications.

One of the most common operations when dealing with asynchronous tasks on Android is to observe the task's result or outcome on the main UI thread. Using vanilla Android, this would typically be accomplished with an AsyncTask. With RxJava instead you would declare your Observable to be observed on the main thread:

public class ReactiveFragment extends Fragment {

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    Observable.from("one", "two", "three", "four", "five")
            .subscribeOn(Schedulers.newThread())
            .observeOn(AndroidSchedulers.mainThread())
            .subscribe(/* an Observer */);
}

This will execute the Observable on a new thread, and emit results through onNext on the main UI thread.

The previous sample is merely a specialization of a more general concept, namely binding asynchronous communication to an Android message loop using the Handler class. In order to observe an Observable on an arbitrary thread, create a Handler bound to that thread and use the AndroidSchedulers.handlerThread scheduler:

new Thread(new Runnable() {
    @Override
    public void run() {
        final Handler handler = new Handler(); // bound to this thread
        Observable.from("one", "two", "three", "four", "five")
                .subscribeOn(Schedulers.newThread())
                .observeOn(AndroidSchedulers.handlerThread(handler))
                .subscribe(/* an Observer */)
                
        // perform work, ...
    }
}, "custom-thread-1").start();

This will execute the Observable on a new thread and emit results through onNext on "custom-thread-1". (This example is contrived since you could as well call observeOn(Schedulers.currentThread()) but it shall suffice to illustrate the idea.)